In brief
- Ethereum developer Martin Holst Swende identified and suggested a fix for a loophole in EIP-1559, a major upgrade scheduled for mid-July.
- The loophole, if left unfixed, would have allowed for fake large transactions that could overwhelm the network.
Ethereum developers have fixed a loophole in a forthcoming upgrade that would have left the network vulnerable to fake large transactions.
Scheduled for mid-July, EIP-1559 burns some ETH spent on processing transactions instead of giving it all to miners, as is currently the case. The proposal aims to reduce the volatility of Ethereum’s transaction fee.
Under EIP-1559, users can “tip” miners and the Ethereum network to speed up transactions. To do this, they specify the maximum amount they are willing to pay.
A report from crypto investment fund Grayscale on Thursday predicted that a proposed upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain, if implemented, would create “a positive feedback loop for Ether’s price”. Decrypt spoke to analysts to understand why.
Per the upgrade, Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559, the Ethereum blockchain would use Ethereum transaction fees to buy ETH on the open market and then destroy it, reducing ETH’s overall supply.
“It’s like a company that earns a profit and buys back sh...
Martin Holst Swende, an Ethereum core developer from Sweden, worked out on Thursday that EIP-1559 placed no limit on the maximum amount a user could pay to speed up transactions.
An attacker could thus insert an absurdly high number to overwhelm the network, even if they didn’t have the funds to pay for the tip.
“Because the fields in 1559 are maximums, you could abuse this, not actually pay those huge gas values, and spam the network,” Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko tweeted Friday.
To close that loophole, the developers implemented a solution proposed by Swende: four lines of codes that capped transactions at a limit of 2^256, a widely used cryptographic hash function that also underpins Bitcoin.
On May 14, Ethereum developers agreed to delay until December a “difficulty bomb” that would make severely slow down the network.
Ethereum developers agreed on Friday how to delay a “difficulty bomb” that, if left unattended, would start to slow down the Ethereum network this summer.
The difficulty bomb is an old piece of code that makes mining on Ethereum slower—and less profitable—over time by exponentially increasing the lag between the production of each block.
The bomb was planted in 2015 to incentivise devs to implement Ethereum 2.0.
Given that the amount on hashrate on the network can influence the bomb, James said...
The difficulty bomb is designed to encourage Ethereum developers to hasten the development of Ethereum 2.0, the long-awaited upgrade to the Ethereum network that would reduce fees and increase throughput.
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